THE Holocaust has always been
marked by numbers. There was the numbering of arms
in death camps and the staggering death toll where
the words six million became both a body count and
a synonym for an unspeakable crime.

After the Holocaust, Germany performed the
necessary long division in paying token reparations
to survivors. More recently, Swiss banks and
European insurance companies have concealed bank
account and policy numbers belonging to dead
Jews.

Only with the Holocaust have dehumanization and
death been as much a moral mystery as a tragic game
of arithmetic. And the numbers continue, although
now largely in reverse.

After 60 years, Holocaust survivors are inching
toward extinction. According to Ira Sheskin,
director of the Jewish Demography Project at the
University of Miami, fewer than 900,000 remain,
residing primarily in the United States, Israel and
the former Soviet Union. Most are in their 80s and
90s. Unless immediate measures are taken, many of
those who survived the Nazi evil will soon die
without a proper measure of dignity.

According to Sheskin's data, more than 87,000
American Holocaust survivors - roughly half the
American total - qualify as poor, meaning they have
annual incomes below $15,000. The United Jewish
Communities, the umbrella organization of the
American Jewish Federations, determined that 25
percent of the American survivors live at or below
the official federal poverty line. (The poverty
figure in New York City is even higher.) Many are
without sufficient food, shelter, heat, health
care, medicine, dentures, eyeglasses, even hearing
aids.

Conditions worldwide are similar. It's a sad
twist that the teenagers who mastered the art of
survival so long ago have been forced, in their old
age, to call on their survival instincts once
again.

It doesn't have to be
this way. Although the various global financial
settlements represent only a small fraction of
the Jewish property that was plundered during
the Holocaust, they still amount to billions of
dollars.

Which raises questions: Why aren't the funds
being used to care for Holocaust survivors in whose
name and for whose benefit these restitution
initiatives were undertaken? Why weren't survivors
permitted to speak for themselves in the very
negotiations that led to the recovery and
distribution of their stolen assets?

Take the Swiss bank settlement, for instance. A
federal judge in Brooklyn distributed 75 percent of
the looted assets to survivors in the former Soviet
Union, leaving only 4 percent for destitute
survivors in the United States, even though roughly
20 percent of the world's Holocaust survivors live
in America.

Assets that had been stolen by the Swiss were
once again diverted, this time by the charitable
inclinations of a judge who, ignoring the voices of
survivors, severed the connection between the
victims of the theft and the proceeds of the
recovery.

On the matter of insurance, a federal judge in
Manhattan recently approved a settlement in which
fewer than 5 percent of the life insurance policies
that had been sold to Jews would be restituted,
allowing the Italian insurer, Generali, to escape
with more than $2 billion in unjust enrichment. By
not requiring Generali to disclose the names of
policyholders, the settlement amounts to a
cover-up. Tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors
are being kept from the truth and will likely be
foreclosed from bringing individual claims against
the corporation that defrauded them.

The Jewish Claims Conference, an organization
established in the 1950s to recover and distribute
Jewish property, has assets under its care
estimated at $1.3 billion to $3 billion, which
includes a vast inventory of cash, real estate and
artwork. Despite the urgency of human suffering,
the conference insists that it cannot respond to
the unmet needs of Holocaust survivors.

Meanwhile, it spent
about $32 million last year on programs
dedicated to "research, documentation and
education." Some of those millions went to a
program that paid $700,000 to a "consultant" - a
friend of the organization's president - who, in
an interview with The Jewish Week,
couldn't recall what he had been asked to
consult on. While the conference supports many
worthy projects, it is controlled not by
survivors but by surrogates, and operates with
limited oversight and financial
accountability.

The Holocaust, so large an atrocity, has a way
of overshadowing everything, including its
survivors. In focusing on the past in order to
prevent history from repeating itself, we have
forgotten those who are the direct casualties of
this crime. Amid all the Holocaust hoopla the
survivors have become secondary.

This neglect is widespread. Even the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum has regarded
itself as primarily a home for historians and a
monument to history, but not as an institution that
places survivors first. Yet without their anguished
presence the museum would not exist.

One demonstration of its inattentiveness
involves the imminent transfer to the museum of
electronic copies of Germany's Bad Arolsen
archives, which hold 50 million documents
pertaining to the fate of more than 17.5 million
victims. Unfortunately, the museum has failed to
commit to making the archives accessible on the
Internet so that they can be accessed as easily by
Holocaust survivors as by visiting scholars.

So what can be done to honor those who survived
but who seem to have been forgotten?

First, all traceable assets held by the
claims conference and the negotiated settlements
with Swiss bankers and European insurance
companies must be returned to their owners, with
the remainder used for survivor needs.

Second, Congress should pass the proposed
Holocaust Insurance Accountability bill, which
would require insurers to publish the names of
policyholders and allow survivors to resolve
claims on fair and truthful terms.

Third, all Holocaust documentation, like the Bad
Arolsen archives and the recently disclosed
Austrian war records, must be made readily
accessible. Survivors and their families must have
easy access so family histories can be recovered
and property claims verified. These archives cannot
be just the province of scholars.

Finally, if both the World Jewish Congress and
the claims conference fail to achieve transparency
in their operations, then Congress or law
enforcement should publicly account for the funds
that have been controlled by institutions that
survivors never elected and did not authorize.

Surviving the Holocaust, which was against all
odds, is still a numbers game. The percentages are
always against the survivors. Nearly murdered,
shamefully defrauded and with the clock ticking,
they wait for justice, accountability and, most of
all, respect.

Thane Rosenbaum, a professor of law at
Fordham, is the author of "The Myth of Moral
Justice."